The Shaman's Mask

Filling in Space

The first time I experience automatic drawing, it feels as if my hand is guided by an outside force. Continuous lines fill in space, forming variations on birdlike images over and over again. The birdlike forms lean against each other, kiss each other, breathe each other, and become each other — each other’s headdresses, each other’s wings.

Suddenly, I fold the piece of paper in half with the impulse to trace what I have already drawn. When the twinning is accomplished, the image is transformed into one that I call, “the Totem.” It has an owl at the crest that rises between the extended horns of a bull, whose visage is interwoven with a fiery-eyed wolf, resting on the great bill of a duck. Now called to colour the image, I make the owl purple, the wolf electric blue, the mallard’s head a radiant, shimmering green, and its bill a cadmium yellow that blends into orange, then vermilion ringed by the crimson of a setting sun.

Turning the piece upside down to explore it further, I find a face with hollow eyes: a mask with an open mouth. Because I have recently come through a pain too great to utter, I call it “the Silent Scream”. Years later, its title will morph into “the Shaman’s Mask,” but for now, layers and layers of meaning move through me as I see in the headdress two fiery, red-headed Arctic loons touching beaks to celebrate their eternal bond at the perimeter of a flaming sun that hovers over and behind the “tree of life.” The tree’s roots penetrate the earth above and “the waters under the earth.” When my eyes blink, the roots became the moustache, surrounding the open mouth of the silent scream. Behind the mask, an opening in the tree of life reveals the third eye.

A whole world opens for me this night, as I see what has come out of me, through me; as I regard what lies beyond my consciousness, inviting my participation but far beyond my ken. What else awaits me in this beyond? For now, I clearly see that loss has become the midwife of my soul, birthing the artist in me.